LONDON — Around midnight at the cheeky tiki Mahiki nightclub, where Prince Harry hangs out when he feels like hanging out, the bottle service crew all agree on the appeal of their resident royal.
“He’s much more attractive than Will,” says Phoetini Kountouris. “He’s a bad boy, but he’s a prince.”
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“He’s fit,” says a girl who introduces herself as “Tabby,” but you can call her “Tibby,” or also “Tib.” “Fiiiiiiiiit.”
Harry, Harry. Hairy Harry. The third in line to the throne is getting singler and cuter, while Prince William is getting bald. And what a big month Harry has had!
First, the expedition — a North Pole charity adventure, in which the prince trekked over ice floes like some Arctic Indiana Jones, wearing a heroically bright orange immersion suit.
Second, the promotion. After five years in the Army Air Corps, this week he attained the rank of captain and earned his solo flying wings.
On April 29, he will serve as best man in the wedding of the decade.
That’s his most accustomed role: William’s little brother. The guy next to the future king.
The spare.
Unfortunate title. And one that could ultimately be the key to his liberation.
The strange plight of the spare to the heir: The older they get, the more obsolete they become. Order of succession gives preference to the eldest male child, then his children, then his children’s children, leaving younger siblings spiraling further from the throne.
William is the one who is about to be married. Harry is the one who is about to be jostled.
In the old days, the spares were dispatched abroad for strategic marital alliances. (Poor Caroline Matilda, the younger sister of King George III. She was shuttled off to Denmark at 15 to wed her mentally ill cousin, King Christian VII.)
The modern role is more nebulous. “In Britain, the only constitutional role is that of the monarch,” says Christopher Warwick, Princess Margaret’s friend and biographer for the last 20 years of her life. “The other people, there’s no job description.”
In a country that sometimes debates the point of its sovereign, it’s even harder to grapple with the point of the sovereign’s kid brother. It’s been a question for generations.
Tim Heald was one of Princess Margaret’s biographers and watched her slide from second in line to the throne to deep in the double digits. “She was a rock star in her day, but she wasn’t in the end, not at all,” Heald says. When Prince Edward, the queen’s fourth child, turned 21, Margaret was informed that she was no longer needed as an official counsel of state. “She’d taken that job very seriously . . . and so she was obviously a bit miffed.”
Princess Anne, Charles’s younger sister — once second in line to the throne but now 10th — has taken a proactive stance, throwing herself into a usefulness-justifying schedule that borders on self-punishing. On a recent day, she had six public appearances, including one at the opening of a Speedo factory.
Meanwhile her younger brother, Prince Andrew, gained the nickname “Randy Andy” for his tawdry relationship with a soft-core porn actress, and more recently has been in the headlines for his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, a financier convicted of hiring an underage prostitute.
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